It's Nice to Be Appreciated... Though Not Exactly in this Way

"They're just sort of waiting for the Baby Boomers to start dying off."

So says Tara Olson, owner of AllPoints Research, a marketing research firm, referring to funeral parlor owners anticipating a boom in their business.

The death rate of about 8.1 per 1,000 people is expected to trend upward sometime in the next decade, potentially topping out at 10.9, reports the Associated Press. The average funeral home is projected to go from serving 120 families a year to 165.

One potential downer: What happens if Boomers skip the fancy burials and go for cremation instead?

You can count on this: Boomers will reinvent death and dying like they've reinvented everything else. Here's my prediction: Boomers will spend less on "dirt and caskets" funerals to memorialize their loved ones and more on cyber tributes. My wife toyed with the idea of creating a business that digitizes family photos and video, creates online memorials to loved ones and posts them for on the Internet for posterity. She dropped the idea when she discovered that someone else had beat her to it.

Now that I think of it, maybe I need to update my will: Cremate me and spread my ashes on the James River. Convert my family photos into a loving tribute set to the beat of "Wooly Bully.

("Death of Bob" image credit: Toonzone.net.)